Domestic goddesses have raised the bar way too high, and after a decade of living in the Karoo, I am on the verge of being thrown out of the sisterhood.
Domestic goddesses have raised the bar way too high, and after a decade of living in the Karoo, I am on the verge of being thrown out of the domestic sisterhood. I still cannot produce a scone, pickle an onion or bake a koeksister. It’s all too reminiscent of those school reports: ‘Must try harder.’
There is no point in all of us becoming domestic goddesses – how would those who embrace it continue to celebrate their superpowers and smirk about their virtues? It’s a question of survival. They came out here to these far-flung parts, all nationalities and creeds, in wagons with just the basics of domestic requirements and learned to preserve fruit and herbs where they found them, bake bread on a fire and, I imagine, make biltong for the long treks.
I visited a school friend at Roadside Inn in Thornville outside my home town of Pietermaritzburg and her father was curing biltong in the eaves of their thatched cottage. There was this raw meat, attracting flies and just hanging there to dry. It was years before I ate biltong again. I had no idea that it was salted, dried, raw meat.
Typically, though, the recipe starts something like: 2 cups of flour, three cups of sugar, 500g butter, four eggs… very often some sort of spice or seasoning I have never heard of. I find recipes for rusks totally intimidating. A friend – perhaps I should say a like-minded friend – told me that rusks were really just dried cake… cook the mixture long enough and you get the makings of rusks. Then you just cut them up and put them in a jar.
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